I hate that there’s a need for articles like this, but I’m glad WIRED is putting them together.

There is so much of both horrible and hopeful in this story. The way we’re normalizing surveillance is really worrying, and I’m glad some people are fighting back.

This looks great!

I think one of the most important things in learning to do research is understanding that it’s a process of argumentation more than a process of discovery.

I tell myself I won’t work nights and weekends, but every semester, there comes a point where this principled stance gets me so behind that I have to work nights and weekends to catch up.

Lot of worrying stuff in here. Edtech needs to take surveillance tech more seriously, because the two are increasingly simultaneous.

As kiddo’s school year has gotten into full swing and mine has gotten busier, I’ve spent less time griping about her school’s use of ClassDojo. However, I’ve also become increasingly annoyed at the fact that the weekly update email I get from the company always has the subject line “What did your child accomplish this week?” The body of the email is divided into two sections: The number of “points” that my child was assigned, and the number of “stories” that my child appeared in. Do points and stories reflect accomplishment?

This week, I’m hurriedly putting together some revisions for a book chapter on data ethics that I’ve been working on for an open access volume on ethics in educational technology. I’m excited about the volume, and I’ve really loved writing the chapter, so it’s kind of fun to be doing these revisions, even if I waited for the last minute to do them.

One reviewer suggestion that I’m particularly grateful for is to elaborate on a sentence I wrote arguing that “learning management systems allow us to monitor students in invasive ways that would be unimaginable in a face-to-face context.” In making that argument, I was drawing from Lance Eaton’s 2021 article The New LMS Rule: Transparency Working Both Ways, which I’ve taken a lot from. Here’s the whole paragraph that I had in mind—and that I’ll be taking inspiration from as I respond to this reviewer’s suggestion:

I’ve been skeptical of writing manuscripts in Markdown or LaTeX for ages, but today I found myself asking where the “code editor” was in Word, so maybe it’s time to give it a try.

Just wrote in an email that the worst part of academia is when my breaks from school don’t line up with my kid’s. I wrote it flippantly, but I don’t think I’m too far off.

Dunno why Canvas took blockquoting out of their WYSIWYG editor, but joke’s on them, because I know where the code editor is and what the right HTML tags are.

I’m currently on a search committee for the new director of our School of Information Science, and it’s kind of neat that academics get to hire their own bosses. My students’ minds were blown yesterday when I explaned this.

There was a brief period of publisher generosity early in COVID times where I snagged so many PDFs of books my uni library usually doesn’t have access to. Still making my way through them.

I have been writing a lot about ClassDojo recently, spurred by a combination of my professional concerns about the app and by my frustration that my kid’s school is now using it. Last week, I was pleased to see a new report from the United Kingdom-based Digital Futures Commission about not only ClassDojo but also Google Classroom. I’m sure my kid will have to use this latter software as well, so it’s good to be aware.

Maybe it’s because of my area of research, but I think the headline here is misleading. Being a teacher on TikTok is one thing, and I’m not opposed to that. Putting your students on TikTok is entirely different, and I struggle to see that being ethically justified. Josh’s research is absolutely the right reference point here.

I just got paid by a journal after they accepted one of my papers, and as happy as I am about this, it is so far out of my normal academic experience that I feel disoriented.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I often listen to Francophone radio stations while working (most often French and Swiss—Radio-Canada doesn’t support streaming outside its own apps and sites). This is a great way to keep up with my French, and because there seems to be a minigenre of Francophone songs critiquing social media (Stromae’s Carmen comes to mind, but there’s at least one other whose name I can’t remember right now), it sometimes ends up being professionally relevant as well.

I’m very glad that figuring out my office phone is not a prerequisite for tenure, or else my application would be in real trouble right now.

Ashamed to say I hadn’t ever thought about this possibility.

Yesterday, I complained about Apple putting artificial limitations on what its hardware and software can do in terms of music syncing in order to make more money out of its consumers (and, probably, keep music companies happy). As I was writing that, I was thinking about similarities with the business model of a lot of mobile apps—let people download the app for free, but keep bonus features (or even the best features) behind a paywall. I understand that business models for apps are tricky, and after a childhood and young adulthood of delighting in how much is free on the internet, I’m finally starting to understand that it’s important to spend money on software and content that we care about. However, it bugs me when this kind of model is used when it doesn’t need to be. Apple is fantastically wealthy and doesn’t need to nickel and dime us like this.

This ‘Black Mirror’ class comes out of my department—happy to see a colleague get credit for such an interesting class!

This is my issue with CS education efforts, especially ’teaching people to code.’ It’s narrowly focused on technical skills and not broader social and ethical reflection. I’d never argue that programmers shouldn’t work for defense contractors, but I’m uncomfortable with associating them so closely with CS education.

C’est dommage de perdre un tel prof. Je ne suis pas de près la situation des profs en France, mais vu combien de problèmes il y a aux États-Unis, ceci ne m’étonne pas trop. Il est peut-être temps de relire « Le hussard noir ».

What a mess of a story. School safety tech is edtech, and like edtech, a lot of it appears to be more posturing and theater than effective practice.

Exciting news! This still leaves a lot of research behind paywalls, though.